Lunds & Byerlys Wild Rice with Ham Soup Review

Lunds & Byerlys is a chain of upscale grocery stores located in the Twin Cities (Minneapolis and St. Paul) area of Minnesota. Since Freezer Meal Frenzy is located in Minnesota, we have easy access to L&B stores — which is great for us, because L&B has their own line of delicious frozen food.

This line includes many flavors of frozen soup, including Beer Cheese, Wild Mushroom, Chicken Noodle, and a few variations of wild rice-based soup. We’ve already checked out their Minnesota Wild Rice with Chicken, which we thought was excellent with one huge caveat — the stuff was loaded with almonds. There are way too many almonds in that soup, and they’re sharp and pokey. That soup is a real mouth-cutter.

So when we picked up the Lunds & Byerlys Wild Rice with Ham Soup, we were hoping for the same top-quality soup with fewer almonds. Now, a quick glance at the ingredients list shows there are almonds in this soup, so we weren’t expecting this to be completely almond-free — we were just hoping there wouldn’t be quite as many as in the Minnesota Wild Rice with Chicken.

Whether you decide to use the stovetop or the microwave, this soup is incredibly easy to heat up. It comes in a plastic bag, which is microwave-safe and also safe to boil in a pot of water. We usually use the stovetop for L&B soups, because that tends to result in a more evenly heated meal. (If you want to see the full cooking instructions, check out our package scan at the bottom of this article.)

Alright, so let’s dig in.

Since the almonds are our biggest concern, let’s address those right off the bat. Almonds are definitely present, as we mentioned earlier. Expect to find big flakes of them floating around in this soup. We picked them out as we ate this soup, and when we were done, we ended up with a pretty substantial pile of almond flakes sitting on a napkin. This is similar to the experience we had with the Minnesota Wild Rice with Chicken. However, we also found the pieces to be less sharp and softer than the ones in the last batch of soup we tried. Perhaps we cooked it a little bit longer this time, though we can’t really remember the exact cook times we used for either batch. If you have concerns about the firmness of the almonds in this soup, you might want to give it five or so extra minutes of cook time.

As you can see in the image below, the ham comes in cube-shaped chunks that are fairly decent in size. They have a salty, porky taste, and they’re a little bit chewy. None of this is bad, mind you — we’re simply describing the taste and texture in the most accurate way we can think of. This isn’t the highest-quality pork, but it’s also not generic tasting. It’s better than average for a frozen meal for sure.

The creamy broth is astounding, as we expected, and the wild rice blend is really incredible. In fact, we would have been perfectly content without the ham (and especially without the almonds). This soup tastes fantastic without all that added stuff.

Some of Lunds & Byerlys foods are insanely high in calories (check out the calories in a pan of their Minnesota Macaroni & Cheese). That’s not so much of a problem here. This soup contains 330 calories, which isn’t all that bad. The sodium is where things get a bit less bright and sunny-looking — there are 730 mg of sodium in this little soup packet. Also, since this soup isn’t all that filling, you’ll probably end up grabbing a snack of some sort to eat alongside this.

The Lunds & Byerlys Wild Rice with Ham Soup is a craveable soup with an almond problem. If you love almonds, you’re going to love this soup. If you don’t love almonds but have the patience to sift them out, you’ll also probably love this. However, if you hate almonds so much that you find their very presence to be offensive, you’re going to want to stay away from this wild rice soup.

If you want to learn more about the nutrition content, ingredients, or cooking instructions for this frozen soup, check out our package scan below.